Kyrgyz language

Kyrgyz language, also spelled Kirgiz, or Kirghiz, member of the Turkic subfamily of Altaic languages. It is spoken in Kyrgyzstan and in the Pamir Mountains on the border between Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and China. The language belongs to the northwestern, or Kipchak, division of the Turkic languages and is closely related to Kazak, Karakalpak, and Nogay.

Kyrgyz is also the name of the Old Turkic language found in inscriptions of the Yenisey River valley in Russia. The relationship between the speakers of Old Kyrgyz and the speakers of Central Asian Kyrgyz is unclear. See alsoTurkic languages.

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group of closely related languages that form a subfamily of the Altaic languages. The Turkic languages show close similarities to each other in phonology, morphology, and syntax, though Chuvash, Khalaj, and Sakha differ considerably from the rest. The earliest linguistic records are Old Turkic...

Kyrgyzstan’s schools and colleges have undergone a drastic reorganization since emerging from the ideological control of the Communist Party. The republic made Kyrgyz the official state language in 1989, and since that time Kyrgyz has begun to play a primary role in education; whole generations of students previously received much of their training entirely in Russian, which was obligatory. As...

...of many Turkic peoples and the relative absence of geographic barriers to communication has resulted in a high degree of similarity and hence mutual intelligibility among most of the languages; Kyrgyz, Karakalpak, and Kazakh in particular are linguistically much alike.